The continued relevance of Lord Acton's dictum

LargeBill pontificates:"I maintain we could pick representatives and senators at random and do as well as we are currently."

My initial reaction is, "I couldn't agree more." But, on second thought, I do have a slight disagreement. I think that we could do significantly better...

(This is not, of course, original, being just an echo of William F Buckley, who famously wrote that "he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty...")